2020/09/25 - bugs
Weird errors reported by guest users. Disappearing photos on Samsung phones when backed up to their computer.
Land line shows up as calling when someone calls on their cell phone. As if 2 separate phone numbers were calling at the same time.
Text message with dozens of phone numbers sharing the first 6 digits as the owner. Who devotes their time to this?
For anyone who thinks Democrats aren't trying to sabotage the election. I present 1 piece of heresay and 1 piece of hard evidence. 1) I received my primary ballot after the date that it was due. 2) Below is an image I captured while trying check my voter registration status on Maricopa.gov website. This error has been around for about 2 decades. It is an internal ASP error, that should never occur in production. It should never be shown to the end user because most people won't understand what went wrong from this message. And, it should never happen because there should be good error checking. Clearly, someone working for Maricopa.gov does not have a mindset for quality assurance, and this would never have happened if they had contracted with me to build their website.
Paypal Xoom is the absolute worst service I have exerienced at a bank. Since, Paypal has also put my funds on hold. Is this modern day American business? Acquire as much money as possible, automate the humanity out of the service until you start losing money? Xoom doesn't ever load when I try to submit my driver's license for verification. Paypal has become just as bad as "all the other banks." I also attempted to upload in incognito mode with no extensions, no Ad-block. Still nada.
Another terrible service is employed by Google rewards program for Visa Gift Cards called prepaiddigitalsolutions.com. Here is a server error from them while trying to check my card balance. Their website is extremely slow and absolute misery to navigate. It usually entails searching my Inbox for a secret token, attempting to log in, failing to log in, and then attempting to log in again and if any cookie crumbs get in the way during all this, the page fails to load. Not a good look for Google. I wish they would stop doing business with them entirely and find a new service. I finally was able to transfer the money off of the prepaid card by using my Square account to create an invoice for the total amount. Good riddance.
What happens when technology's lies and failures bleed in to daily life? Here are some pictures of a blowout we just had. Below the blowout is a picture of the tire pressure guage. It was low on the tire that blew out, so of course I went to check the pressure of the wheel that is indicated, the back passenger side wheel. The pressure was nominal so I thought it was a problem with the guage because I just filled all my tired evenly and within their limits. I continued my trip. Later, after the blowout, I had to put the donut on. Finally, a picture of the guage shows the back passenger tire, but you can clearly see from the picture the wheel that is at zero pressue is actually indicating the donut on the front passenger side. The tire guage is lying to me! They put my life in danger. I am pretty sure that the CEO of Chevy is not interested in fixing a design problem where a car mechanic can plug something in backwards, or however this happened.
This screen shot is just kind of silly. I copied a heading from some paywalled article and the top search result is obviously not what I was looking for. (click) Oh Google, you know me too well. Seriously, cut it out, stop showing me stuff you think I want to see.
I can't resist the urge to test fate. I recently closed my LinkedIn because I didn't find it useful anymore. But on my way out I of course came across some job postings. I started my application for SquareSpace. What an idea! Create an easy way for business builders to build their business online! I've tried to make builders before. When I was younger, I thought it was so novel to see the little drag and resize anchors in Powerpoint. I've tried to replicate that behavior, because Microsoft can't open source how they did. I was applying for SquareSpace and when I finished the application form, I got a lovely error "Application expired, please refresh the page and try again.". Wow. I hope they don't treat their customers this poorly. Personally, I would never tell someone to refresh the page and start from scratch. That reflects very badly on a company that is supposed to pride itself on good design.
I take no pleasure in pointing out other people's blunders. But, how can someone ever become humble if they aren't humiliated? Here is another one from Greenhouse.io. You don't want to manage hiring people, so you outsource it to another company that screws up at hiring people? Enter, ADP. I've written about another negative experience with ADP. Where I had a call with someone who asked me "what job site did you apply through?" Just to lie and gaslight me in to questioning my own reliability and make me look like a liar. ADP sucks and is completely immemorable. All those employees and engineers being paid by business' account fees and they can't even test their product on a mobile phone.
Good grief. I can hardly believe I actually now appreciate the high standards of quality my previous bosses enforced on my work.
Wow. Been a while since I updated this page, couple of months. I have continued to collect weird incidents online. I did notice slightly less weirdness in Chrome logins, but maybe that's just because I've gotten so used to them I don't see them anymore.
Odd, one day I revist Facebook developers and the page has disappeared!
If you scroll far enough in your Facebook feed, eventually they'll think you've just arrived.
Here's an unintentional vulnerability from LinkedIn. If someone blocks you, and their profile disappears, you can always use Incognito mode to see if it is just you they don't want to talk to you.
I just can't seem to get over utility companies making it harder for their customers to pay their bills. It's like they are trying to fail.
Again, APS is awful at programming apparently, because I can't imagine a scenario when my balence in unavailable. They typically love telling me I owe them, but not today.
Jesus, for all the maintanence they do, nothing ever seems to improve.
This was extremely annoying. Phoenix city services website tries to autofill your account number in a secret field, and then tells me it's wrong. I did eventually get past this step by logging out and submitting the form annonymously where I can enter my account number manually. It's almost like they are intentionally trying NOT to service people.
Just submitted my scholarship essay to The Temple of Satan and got this nice JSON response instead of a web page:
I didn't know the Ice Cream shop I worked at when I was 15 was actually a government contractor!! I do sometimes wonder how much of my life has been orchestrated, like the The Game with Michael Douglas.
This is a new bug that is extra annoying. Chrome on Android started doing this thing where if a certain video starts playing, it doesn't update the screen, it freezes, or shows an old page. When I try to write something on Facebook, it switched me back to LinkedIn.
Another annoying development from Chrome mobile. It's almost like they are adding bugs from desktop Chrome to mobile. In this picture, the video starts playing for about 2 seconds and then turns to fuzz, and then a 3 seconds of fuzz and it goes back to normal.
This isn't so much a bug as it is a phishing attempt. Nice job copying amazon in this display. Ironically, I tried to report this domain and Gmail blocks my outgoing message. I guess we're not supposed to report wrong things anymore.
Always love seeing the good old Microsoft error page on a public website. I wonder if they know these can be replaced by better looking pages.
Wordpress isn't always easy to configure, this one is missing a link to the job application and just shows up as plain text.
IMDb's advertisment failed to load but they made me wait the whole 15 seconds for it anyways staring at a black screen.
This is pretty embarassing coming from a billion dollar publisher. Trying to apply for a job with Activision. Hell, I'd even fix their website for them if they asked. I'm willing to bet they don't even know the difference between http and https.
I think the most frustrating part about all these images is how when I am working for a software company, I am held to extremely high standards of quality control. I have to test my own work with unit tests, other people test my work with code reviews, and multiple layers of business quality assurance above that checks my work. So how in the hell does this kind of stuff make it out to the public without being tested? Did anyone try to enter https? Did anyone try to enter capital letters? Shame on you Activision.
Pretty low key month. I've isolated myself to working on this game engine. I constantly have problems with my power company APS. Here's a complaint for the rich and powerful, why is it punishable for me to screw up and not pay my bill on time, but when I try to pay my bill on time there is no refund for when they screw up my schedule because their payment system is down? Don't I deserve a refund because you add complexity to my bill pay? Why should I give you my bank account number, especially if I am a contractor and my income is inconsistent, why should I be punished with fees for my clients actions?
There is no good file-syncing service. Here is a complaint from the FreeSync forums about creating duplicate files. My Google Drive has many duplicate folders and uploading has slowed to a crawl < 12 kbs. FreeSync can't do anything with folders that are the same name.
Sometimes I think the people to manage and create online applications, don't use them. Or they don't understand the messaging.
I've been building a simple crawler in node to make a backup of all my bookmarks so reference research material can't be disappeared suddenly. A few sites gave me trouble, like it would cause the script to freeze, one such site was this blog that has an icon with a vertical-align property set, but the container doesn't have a fixed size so it was creating a nearly infinitely long page, 6,000+ pages when my script tried to print it to PDF. Also, something about this stylesheet exposes where it came from, maybe some debugging reference, it was CSS, not SCSS. This problem disappeared in Incognito mode, but it happened even in a completely separate Puppeteer copy of Chrome with a completely separate profile with extensions disabled.
https://www.davidhaney.io/dist/E:/C/blog/hugo/olowolo/themes/even/src/css/E:/C/blog/hugo/olowolo/themes/even/src/css/E:/C/blog/hugo/olowolo/themes/even/src/css/_iconfont.scss
Interesting that this file IFpc80 led me to this page for a networking tool Open SIPS. It seems like the kind of file that could be created from a failed memory exploit. Like someone trying to replace Apple's SIP with a vulnerable one.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to copy some old hard drives and NTFS still doesn't work on Mac. No write access. I plug it in to Parallels and that works fine, but there are 4 services constantly scanning the drive, no wonder it is so slow. Spotlight is index the drive, Parallels indexes the drives looking for Windows apps to provide Spotlight with, and Windows scans the drive for indexing and for viruses. No wonder our computers seem slow with all the data being scanned.
A recruiter starts texting the wrong number of someone who is also looking for a job and emails me saying we are already talking. Maybe certain phone numbers are vulnerable to typing in wrong. Things did not go well, she didn't like that I have been out of work and I left my previous company when I realized they are bait-and-switching customers, which is why we had to update billing configurations every 2 weeks.
I also learned that recruiting companies recruiter for other recruiting companys which recruit for other recruiting companies which is like playing telephone when the end recruiter has never talked to the actual hiring company. I realized this when I came across and Indian recruiting company hiring for Cognizant which was actually hiring for Amtec for some obscure college project called FACETS. I thought it was impossible that a business would depend on a .03 version release for creating an SQL ORM.
Another week passed full of bugs. Despite the missing image below, that is actually because I keep forgetting to copy the file extension when I put images in my code. This should be fixed when I finish my little blog editor, SaaS app (within the next 6 months hopefully). This week, I tried to pay my centurylink bill, their template was off and created a giant blank white page.
I see this as a sign a business isn't going very well. Take my bank for example, not only, they haven't figured out how to DevOps. They have outages all the time and I have trouble logging in. This makes me curious, is blogging about someone's mistakes defamation? Where do we draw the line with free speech? What if a person claims to be a police officer and then harasses people online?
Indeed has instructions to delete your account, but there is no delete account button. What would they have to gain by collecting people's personal information indefinitely? Will they change this with the onset of California's CCPA (aka Hipster GDPR) laws?
I thought it would be neat if I could "abuse" LinkedIn in to giving me a reverse phone number lookup using their contacts upload. I mentioned before that LinkedIn hands out previous user's zip codes which is protected data according to PCI-DSS. After I tried to upload a contact, their banner started overlapping on every page. I realize it's also protected information to give out someone's phone number, but they are claiming to be Mark Zuckerberg, so I don't feel bad.
Another week of internet ruined by advertising and GDPR. This advertisement did NOT go away when I closed it and covered the entire page. This GDPR advertisement couldn't be closed at all!
This image below, is of a spammer sending emails. I knew this possible for a while to send an email from a phone number, I couldn't imagine how this would be misused. Also, please do not make donations on Facebook. If you see someone in need, give them what they need. Sending money over the internet is a terrible idea and Facebook does not care about your finances.
Finally, this one is really weird, a file popped up in the project I am working on and I have no idea what created it called "IFpc80". It's almost like someone out there is intentionally trying to ruin my project. Maybe a compiler has been compromised and one of my tools inserted it as a kind of marker for GitHub of who's computer is vulnerable using this file. I will be emailing this hypothesis to Krebs.
I am adding a description for each of these pictures so people can understand what is going on. This is a picture of Amazon Prime showing the same show multiple times in my list. This just started happening a few days ago.
I was just browsing the Houzz website and the Facebook button doesn't appear and I can't click Google Sign In either. It doesn't respond at all. When I first saw Houzz, I thought it was a stupid idea, like Brookstone or Sharper Image before it. But I saw some forums and I think their setup is nice, so I can kind of understand their digital magazine business. Maybe they have already closed up shop and stuff it just hanging out there. Switching to Incognito mode didn't help.
I haven't written about this in 10 years. I suppose that is when I started noticing it. In the picture below, I returned to the Apple System Preferences dialog after leaving it open and doing some other work. When I returned to the System Preferences, a strange popup, covering up the iCloud settings screen, that appears to be partially rendered. There are buttons to modify settings or something, I didn't click on anything, but it appear in the middle of the dialog. I think I had to force quit.
This error below I come across quite a bit. I try to open the website to my power company, and it is only partially working. This time, it refused to render my list of billing history. The page opens, and a little loading circle shows up. When this happens, I try to use Chrome incognito or Safari, and it works fine. I do have uBlock Origin enabled in Incognito mode, so I wouldn't be caused by that pluggin. I suspect Chrome has some sort of internal plugin that is corrupted, maybe through a hack from government spying.
The following error cropped up, I believe because they are trying to give me a false sense of security. The error says "You are not allowed to log in from this IP address". The region of the world that I first created my account is the only region I am allowed to sign in from. I contacted their support team, which was not easy because "freeCodeCamp" doesn't have a single link to support. Eventually I was able to log in, but this is a grotesque abuse of geolocation capabilities, and provided a bad experience. I won't be using their platform anymore and I deleted my account.
By the time I get Visual Studio installed on Windows. I am set up to start writing code. 3:00 PM rolls around and my computer freezes. Every day, at the same time, for about 240 seconds, and then snaps back to normal. But, if I disable the virus scanner, it doesn't freeze.
Below is a picture of switching between apps. For some reason, the app sometimes doesn't appear at all. This is separate from "Incognito mode" in Chrome which will show the Chrome icon at the top, but then also shows a blank gray page for you security while using Incognito. The same thing applies for apps like private Instagram photos or apps that are set to keep your information private. These types of apps still render their logo and window, but the content is usually blanked out. This error happens on random apps, it isn't always the same, sometimes it is Chrome, sometimes Hangouts.
This is a picture of a bank's website CSS rendering improperly. Not sure what could cause this, maybe a developer not following the rules, or a cached template that didn't expire and update on time.
This password entry box is from the CIA, I am posting it because of how commically complex their requirements are. Most password interfaces don't look like this anymore and this is exactly the kind of password their agents probably write on sticky notes and paste underneath their desks.
I've imagine 2 possible extreme scenerios. We've built complexity in to so many systems, that eventually they become unmaintainable and then fail. Or, our collective society is getting smarter, and complex systems are easily replaced, and suddenly I might wake up in a world that has completely changed without my noticing it.
This one I love because I actually got a response from FBI support. I clicked on a link from LinkedIn, advertising job offers with the FBI. When I landed, their authentication system blocked the LinkedIn link. I emailed this screenshot to the FBI, they haven't offered me a job to come in and fix it. They have a requirement that you must NEVER EVER have used drugs anytime in your past, present, or future. I find this extremely self-righteous and judgemental. People change, slowly.
Every day I open LinkedIn, it starts off my feed with this connection error.
This error below is actually pretty infuriating to me. I reported this as a security flaw to LinkedIn and then I was banned from their platform for reporting it, and they accused me of Identity Theft. Basically, when I sign up on my phone, I enter my first and last name on the first screen, and for some reason, my zip code was automatically filled with Kansas. I've never been to Kansas. This provides no benefit to the user, and could be used to track someone down without even being a LinkedIn member.
In the first scenario, I've begun noticing more and more, completely unexplainable bugs. Maybe they are old cached files interfering with the page, maybe some sort of memory leak in the case of phone bugs. Maybe it's too complex, and we have to start over. When I started realizing something strange was happening, I got in the habit of taking screen shots of it. I'll post the screen shots here so, hopefully, someday in the future someone can look back and see the evidence of complete chaos.
The image above is a picture of a CSS z-index error. The message was intended to be on top of the menu for users to accept, it shows up behind giving the page a weird look. The image below was pretty annoying. I was using Square to set up an invoice and it let me complete everything and submit the Invoice until the next screen where it said it failed. I realized I had to go back and select a specific date to the send the Invoive because their default option of "Send Immediately" was broken and couldn't validate. Telling me which field cause the validation to fail would have been nice!
My phone automatically offerred to connect me to a wifi with a strange name.
I run in to this problem a lot. It also happens with LinkedIn's identitify verification and causes a bad experience. When I take a picture with today's modern phone cameras, most of those images are larger than 2MB. So instead of converting the image client side and uploading it, they block the upload entirely. This happens because nobody tested it was working.
On the upside of things. Some things have begun working extremely well, and I barely noticed. The DMV (department of motor vehicles) doesn't take hours for simple tasks, you can actually get things done in 20 minutes or less now. Amazon takes returns from UPS, that's incredible that they would choose another company in order to offer pickup locations. Courthouses have libraries and printing services inside of them now. Businesses suddenly started bringing credit card machines to the customer instead of taking their card away. like they've done in Europe for years to prevent identity theft.
This is an error on one of the screens at Whole Foods.
Ok, I pick on Amazon/Whole Foods a lot because they deserve it. They have so many employees, they should be able to check each other's work.
I have created this new category for blogging about projects or other computer oriented topics that display a particular level of intelligent design. For example, a graphic user interface (GUI) that simply works really well. Or, complaining about how ridiculous Microsoft's design is and how much better I could have done if I had written it. More to follow...